Ron DeSantis was destined to fail
The overhyped Florida governor had virtually no chance of beating Donald Trump in the GOP primary. Why was DeSantis such a sensation in the first place?
Ron DeSantis reduced himself to a punchline as quickly as he ascended from relative unknown to media darling. Touting his warped version of individual freedom, Florida’s governor achieved notoriety during peak COVID and sailed that wave to a promising presidential campaign. A healthy dose of detached cruelty and in-person awkwardness, however, completely derailed DeSantis’s aims of leap-frogging his volatile contemporary, Donald Trump.
DeSantis lasted a caucus. And then he bowed out and immediately bowed down to the man he initially sought to dethrone by embodying the sharpest edges of his demagogic worldview. As expected, Trump charges on, nearly uncontested, into a repeat race of 2020. Meanwhile, the 45-year-old former collegiate baseball player returns to the Sunshine State with a crude understanding that his best days, both athletically and politically, are likely behind him.
Where and when did Mr. Top Gun crash and burn? It’s hard to pinpoint a defining misstep that resulted in DeSantis sliding from champion of the Andrew Cuomo pandemic standoff to ridiculed robot traipsing through Iowa cornfields just for the vibes.
It’s easier to comprehend how DeSantis gradually lost favor with specific factions of his base. Unlike Trump, DeSantis failed to nail the exercise of descending into the deepest caverns of the right-wing fringe and emerging with a corps of centrist support still intact. Crucially, DeSantis had not decades of celebrity to lean on but mere months; his schtick, unrefined and performed primarily in virtual settings during the height of coronavirus, wore thin. Where Trump was fraudulent, DeSantis was flaccid, and in the maelstrom of entertainment politics, a cause célèbre is indestructible.
An initial adopter of the live-and-let-everyone-contract-coronavirus approach, DeSantis showed off his bona fides as a true conservative by opposing school closures and mask regulations. Florida became one of few United States meccas for those restless souls aching to ditch the vicissitudes of a social distancing lifestyle. DeSantis hailed these migration trends — away from the constricting disease-ridden urban nightmares and toward the vast expanse of liberating red states — as an outgrowth of his hard-line stance while ignoring that his anti-science policies led to a steep increase in the Floridian death rate.
Following this honeymoon phase, wherein DeSantis could do no wrong in Republicans’ eyes and mainstream outlets were firing off a fusillade of think pieces and profiles practically dream-boarding his 2025 inauguration speech, the impish sexy Trump alternative reminded anti-government crusaders that, in fact, he prefers to keep his meaty paws on the levers of power. Once the belle of the GOP ball, DeSantis’s immediate thirst for more control perturbed his once-unshakeable acolytes. In short order, he imposed his mighty will, cleaving centrists and abandoning cling-on libertarians with rafts of brazen legislation that was, at best, nonsensical and at worst, deeply damaging to his constituency.
There was the sweeping anti-LGBTQ law, framed as child protection. The racist bill curbing peaceful protest, drawn up in response to Black Lives Matter. The highly publicized book bans, promoted in the name of parental rights. The hostile takeover of a liberal institution, just because.
None of these rock throws could replicate the massive ripple from the flouting of COVID-19 decorum. A long shadow was cast when DeSantis climbed the ladder of political relevancy in 2020. He’s been chasing it in vain ever since.
As the wheels of his imaginary presidential motorcade became unhinged, so too did the strategy DeSantis employed to re-capture the hearts, minds and wallets of his party. Leveling up his pugilistic reputation, the DeSantis team hired a social media enforcer with a shady background in Eastern European politics. He used asylum seekers as his puppets, trading a bit of human trafficking for the opportunity be perceived as a more brass-knuckled architect of border wall-building than his celebrity developer rival.
He picked a fight with Disney, perhaps the strongest signal yet that he’d lost the plot. DeSantis was rewarded with infighting at the highest ranks of his most deep-pocketed funder, foretelling a premature ending to a journey once poised to go the distance.
Even the most firebrand governors can feign concern for their populist voters. DeSantis spared no such space in his calendar. As Florida’s quality of health care sagged, teen birth rates soared, and drug overdose deaths ballooned, DeSantis decamped for a coronavirus victory lap, stumping for future losers like Kari Lake in Arizona. He’d often trace the same steps as Trump, two peas in a rotten pod. But amid the shared vision of boosting election denialists into prominent political positions, both DeSantis and Trump each recognized their camaraderie had an expiration date.
It wasn’t until DeSantis’s presidential campaign was officially underway that he was forced to reckon with the seminal question he’d continually punted on in the past. Finally, he acknowledged Trump lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020. This rare acceptance of reality didn’t earn him the approval from moderates he’d long equivocated on, nor did it seal a competitive edge over the former president.
Instead, DeSantis received blowback from the molten core of the Republican party, which had grown increasingly extremist in the days following January 6, 2021. Lake, who once boasted of the chance to be the “DeSantis of the West”, now derided the governor for calling his state’s most famous resident a loser.
On the GOP debate stage, DeSantis struggled to separate himself from the chaotic bombast of Vivek Ramaswamy and the biting wit of Nikki Haley. His poll numbers started sinking deeper than a scuba diver in the Keys. The former frontrunner was toast.
DeSantis was also, increasingly evident with each campaign stop, milquetoast. Every movement, from his hand placement to his hand shaking to his intonation to the way he stood to the way he sort-of smiled, was heavily scrutinized. The vigor that endeared him to party leaders less than four years prior was gone. He came off as rehearsed to the point of forgetting how human interaction worked.
The extent to which DeSantis’s unfriendliness irrevocably fractured his odds is probably overblown. But it underscored a more significant point. If he appeared to be straining through the simplest part of being a politician, glad-handing rural folks already in his corner, how would he be able to cozy up to the most powerful world leaders with the finesse expected of a U.S. president?
DeSantis’s odd stances, both politically and physically, are not unique. Trump has been blasted for some of the same weird mannerisms and social blunders. The difference is that Trump can overcome these awkward interactions on the trail because he’s propelled by the tailwind of decades of positive media coverage. The false depiction of Trump as a creator of opportunities, a straight shooter and a winner has been ingrained permanently into the brain creases of the voters who can’t quit him.
DeSantis doesn’t possess the same cache from which to pull. Not even close. The trance he lulled conservatives into is far less binding than the Trump curse. As his campaign floundered, DeSantis desperately tried to re-ignite the spark of his cult of personality, scraping for laudatory press that once came in droves but now trickled in like a leaky faucet. Trump, on the other hand, can rest assured he’ll still be a cult leader long after his death. He’s controlled the attention economy for so long that any media allure that an opponent like DeSantis garners is never anything more than window shopping.
Trump’s other trump card, if you will, is that, in the chasm between 2020 and now, he has not been tasked with governing. He can speak of the harm he wishes to inflict if he wins the presidency again — or if attempts to seize it illegally again — but he is not currently passing legislation that is killing the people he should serve. This provides him the leeway to position himself to his fervent followers as an everyman in his ongoing legal battles (“If it can happen to me…”). Since he’s not the one passing laws right now, Trump can also be emboldened to flip-flop on issues like abortion, despite his Supreme Court overhaul revealing quite clearly which side he’s on. DeSantis is not afforded such luxuries.
It’s almost certainly the case that Trump was unbeatable in this primary. Nonetheless, DeSantis was not the formidable foe media members praised him to be. He’d make a great authoritarian, if only he could successfully pair showmanship with barbarism. Instead, his punches withered, his bold provocations began to sound like whimpers, and the warm embrace voters needed from him felt stiff as an exoskeleton.
The havoc DeSantis created in his home state to carry him to Washington is now havoc for the hell of it. He returns to his playground of destruction as a veritable loser, fueled, perhaps, by the deluded notion that the reason he fell so short of winning the Republican nomination is because he wasn’t cruel enough.